


Poison the Well

by ant5b



Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Possessed Scrooge AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-14 23:04:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14778978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ant5b/pseuds/ant5b
Summary: “No, Scrooge. I’m going to tear your life apart from the inside out.”





	Poison the Well

**Author's Note:**

> This story is based on on AU comic by tricia-morvill @ tumblr. If you haven't checked out her art, definitely do so!

“I’m sorry.”

It’s the last thing Scrooge hears before a rushing sound fills his ears. 

The world around him slows, and darkness begins to encroach on his vision. He turns away from his desk, every muscle in his body moving at a glacial pace, and sees Webby’s friend, the one Beakley was always fretting over. 

Scrooge had heard the creak of his study door opening, the muffled but distinct footfalls of a child trying to sneak up on him. He thought it was Webby, wanting to convince him to join her and the rest of the children at the movie theater. Despite her extensive training, Webby hardly used a wink of it on Scrooge; instead they made a game of it, how terribly unsubtle she could be at creeping up on him. 

But instead of his honorary niece it’s Lena looking back at him, her eyes wide with surprise and maybe horror as she slowly backs away from him. 

Scrooge’s body betrays him, and he feels his legs begin to buckle. He forces his gaze downward as he grips the edge of his desk with white knuckles, and sees a purple amulet hanging around his neck. Almost as soon as he acknowledges its presence, the amulet begins to burn, searing his skin even through his coat. 

_ Possession _ , he knows almost at once. Rare, but nothing he hasn’t dealt with before. 

But it has never been this fast acting before. It has never stolen his breath and blacked out his vision. It has never stolen his voice before.

His beak opens then, but not of his own accord. An snakeoil mimicry of his voice trickles out. 

_“Long time no see, Scrooge, dear,”_ says a voice that is not his, and Scrooge allows himself a moment of genuine fear before darkness overtakes him. 

 

 

 

Magica de Spell is a name Scrooge never thought he would hear again. 

Banished to realm beyond imagining, a land of shadows,  _ limbo _ , Scrooge has felt secure in the knowledge that he and his family was beyond her reach. That they would be safe. 

He’s paying for that arrogance now. 

Scrooge is blind and cold and his torso is held in a vice that makes it nearly impossible to breathe. It’s magic, dark magiks, familiar in their origin but alien in their strength. He battles invisible chains that bog down his will, making his hold on reality tenebrous. 

But Scrooge gathers wherewithal to speak all the same. “Show yourself,  _ witch _ .”

The blackness leeches away bit by bit, until he’s left sprawled on the floor of his study, somehow feeling colder than before. Lena is nowhere to be found. 

He rises shakily to his knees, his shadow stretching improbably on the rug before him. His shadow warps in front of his eyes, convulses and twists, until it becomes that of a woman. The shadow’s beak opens in a sharp smile, as do the red slits that serve as her eyes. 

“It looks like you’ve seen better days,” the shadow says affably. 

“ _ Release _ me, Magica,” Scrooge orders, his voice fire and steel. But he feels wrongfooted, taken by such surprise that shock hounds him with all the force of a raging bull, and he speaks with more bravado than he feels. 

All at once he is laying flat on the ground, completely paralyzed, and feeling as if his entire body is being crushed. 

“No, I don’t think I will, old friend,” Magica replies softly. 

“What have you done?” Scrooge demands hoarsely, his face mashed into the carpet. 

“That amulet my dear niece put around your neck,” Magica says, her shadow turning serpentlike. She sidles up beside Scrooge’s face. “It lets me control you. Long story short, every word out of your mouth, anytime you so much as lift a finger —that’ll be me from now on.”

Terror, an old forgotten friend, seizes in Scrooge’s chest like an icy fist around his heart. He tries to close the limp hand lying immobile beside him, and doesn’t even produce a twitch.

“So I’ll become your puppet, eh?” he asks. “By controlling me, you can finally get my Dime, my wealth of magical artifacts, my  _ actual  _ wealth for that matter—”

Magica titters, a horrifying sound when coming from the mouth of a demonic shadow entity. “Oh, Scrooge, you think too small,” she says. “As you can see, I’m not entirely corporeal yet. My magiks are limited. Lena has served her part. Now I need  _ your  _ resources to free me.” 

“So I’m to be your get out of jail free card,” Scrooge replies snarkily. 

“You are so much more than that,” Magica croons, trailing a finger down his cheek. Her shadow leaves a cold in its wake that defies description, chilling Scrooge to the very marrow of his bones. It races down his spine, but he can’t even move to shudder at it. 

“For ten years I’ve been trapped here,” she says liltingly. “There isn’t as much to do in a desolate shadow realm as you’d think. I’ve lost and regained my sanity more times than I could count. And now, with your help, I’m going to have some real fun for the first time in a long, long time.”

“And what’s your idea of fun?” Scrooge asks. “Shaving cats? Building a house made of candy?”

“I’d forgotten how amusing you become when you’re afraid,” Magica remarks. “No, Scrooge,” she goes on magnanimously, “I’m going to tear apart your life from the inside out.”

It isn’t a threat Scrooge hasn’t heard before, especially from anyone in his cadre of archenemies. But none of them had ever reduced him to his present state, prone and powerless, and for a moment after Magica speaks Scrooge almost forgets how to breathe. 

“I’ve been watching you and your family for some time,” Magica says, “picking up the pieces are we? Well, unfortunately for you, I’ve seen all the little cracks that remain.”

“If you lay so much as a  _ finger  _ on any of them—” Scrooge begins to threaten, only for his hand to close in a fist, though not of his own volition. 

“Well it wouldn't be  _ me _ , would it, dear?” she asks, her tone simpering. 

Scrooge falls to silence in the wake of his dawning horror. 

“If you’re good, I won’t hurt them too badly,” Magica assures him. “But when I’m through with them, they  _ will  _ hate you, Scrooge. All of them. Irrevocably. And only when your last relation spits on your name will I have you release me from my prison.”

Her hand seals over his head, and it is as though his skull has been encased in a block of solid ice. Scrooge’s vision whites out for an instant at the extreme cold. 

“I won’t kill you, Scrooge,” Magica says. “For your crimes against me, I will leave you in a world so desolate, an existence so hopeless, you will pray for death. My punishment will be your own—you will be alone, forever. And after all, wasn’t it you who put it best?”

Magica’s entire shadow begins to adhere to his body, sinking into him like a stone in water. He can no longer feel his own limbs; all that remains is dread and grief and guilt and fear. 

While he has no control over body, it is his beak that opens and his voice that says, “Family is nothing but trouble.”

 

 

 

They go on an adventure, because that’s what they do. 

 

Scrooge has been living with Magica under his skin for the better part of a week, made a prisoner in his own body. 

Only twice does she return control to him, but it’s more akin to  loosening a dog’s leash than actual freedom. She drags his consciousness back beneath the surface before he can tell anyone what is happening, that everything is terribly, sickeningly wrong. He watches the world move around him, watches his family move around him, as if through a gossamer veil. 

But the frailty of the veil is deceptive. He spends his every waking moment, many as there are, testing its integrity and finds no weaknesses. If anything, he’s the one growing weaker. 

Magica hardly allows his body food or rest, instead holing them up in his study, the manor’s library, or the archives. She pores over dusty, cracked and ancient tomes faster than he can decipher with his strained, addled mind, and pays his family very little mind. 

Scrooge would almost be offended that so far the witch had only used his body to get access to a library, but he knows better. Despite the numbness he feels being so detached from his body, he knows that Magica is researching ways of freeing herself. 

Those days he spends alone will haunt him for years to come. With nothing but looming bookshelves and the dark, empty corners she forces him into, his only company is Magica—her sickly sweet voice in his head, or his voice in dead air. 

She knows that he probably hates her speaking with his voice most of all. 

Though adept with sword and fists, Scrooge’s most deadly weapon has always been his words. Clever words and quick thinking are what got him out of Glasgow nearly a century and a half ago. A sharp tongue was key to being a shrewd businessman, and there was no one more shrewd than Scrooge. 

But where this sharpness ought to have dulled in the presence of his family, he instead learned to hone his words so they inflicted the most damage possible. 

Scrooge’s words hurt people as much as his actions do, if not more. It was recriminations and insults that made Donald leave him, the pathetic old man in his big fancy house, not an exchange of blows. 

With the children newly returned to his life, Scrooge learns to temper his barbs, to gentle his tone. He doesn’t always succeed, but he makes a promise to himself never to hurt them as he did so many others; as he did their mother, their uncle. 

Magica knows this. She dips her finger into his mind as one does a still pond, twirling it around until his consciousness is labyrinthine and aching, and she knows everything about him that she has not already gleaned for herself. 

She speaks with his voice in the emptiness of his study, at times pensive and in-character as she analyzes a particular historical account. Other times she’s mocking, loud and grating, asking things like, “if you told Louie how worthless he is, do you think that would be enough to make them leave? Or would he not tell anyone and instead suffer in silence? I think that’s more characteristic of the McDuck clan.”

 

Magica eventually finds what she’s looking for, nearly a week after her ruinous appearance. 

She (he,  _ they _ ) announces to the family that they will be embarking on a search of the Crowsican Eye, a mystical object of legend said to allow its bearer glimpses into alternate planes of reality. Just the sort of bauble that would pique Scrooge McDuck’s interest. 

The Eye is a stepping stone, he knows. A piece of the key that will unleash Magica de Spell’s full might; with the Eye, she can pinpoint her exact location in the vast multiverse, and come that much closer to fulfilling the promise she made to him. 

Scrooge fights her control, every moment of every day. He makes her fight for every step, every word that she forces past his teeth. He was ever one to spit in the face of beings more powerful than himself, and this is no exception. 

He’s determined to wear her resolve, until the pale shadow that is all that remains of Magica de Spell is forced to yield under his greater will. And though he fears for his family while Magica influence hangs over him, she gives no indication of carrying out the threats she had made. She had always been one to bite off more than she could chew. 

Scrooge determines that she won’t risk circumstances so extreme or emotionally charged when her hold on him is still tenuous, but he doesn’t stop being careful. 

He never considered that he might be wrong. 

 

The Crowsican Eye is located deep in the bowels of an ancient temple, per the norm. They follow winding tunnels and leap across deep chasms, deftly avoiding booby traps. The veil still separates Scrooge from his body, but Magica does nothing to indicate that anything is amiss, even with him doggedly analyzing her every movement and intonation. 

They retrieve the Eye with little fuss. The children brilliantly discover a way of keeping the temple from falling around their ears after they get their hands on the eye, and Donald actually smiles at him, without the pall of grief or apathy that colors so many of their interactions.

The low, simmering dread that he has been fighting since Magica declared they would be going on an adventure abates slightly. He doesn’t stop resisting her control, not for an instant, he stops feeling quite so afraid. That, of course, is his first mistake. 

The way out of the temple is more treacherous than the way in, forcing them to climb back up to the surface by lashing ropes to jutting cliff faces and pull the children up. Donald is an old hand with a grappling hook, and Launchpad is just as good, so it’s not long before the three of them are all standing on the level above the four children, who have ropes tied around their waists. 

Scrooge is pulling Huey up, and in the absence of control over anything he says or does, he listens to his great-nephew’s rambling about the types of rock he is passing by. 

“That looks like feldspar, but I’d need better lighting to be sure. Definitely a triclinic crystal system either way! It’s a little pink, so I think—yes! That’s quartz right there, so this is definitely feldspar—” 

Scrooge is listening with a fondness he wouldn’t admit to a soul, when his hands slacken around the rope keeping Huey tethered. 

Huey gasps, a sound that slices through Scrooge with white-hot terror, cutting his quaint ramble short as he falls half a dozen feet. 

Scrooge’s grip tightens on Huey’s rope before he can fall any further. 

He may have no control over his body, but it feels like he’s lost the ability to breathe in the seconds before Magica has him stepping forward and look over the edge. He glances down to see his nephew, at least fifteen feet below, clutching the rope tightly with both hands. His eyes are wide as he looks back up at Scrooge. 

“Uncle Scrooge?” Huey asks shakily. 

Scrooge’s beak tilts in an apologetic smile. “Ack, apologies, lad! The rope just slipped a bit, nothing to worry about!”

His body pulls Huey up the rest of the way and claps his nephew on the shoulder. Scrooge is all too aware of how close they are to the edge, his easily Magica could jerk his arm forward and send his bright, responsible Huey tumbling into the darkness.

“You were always one to underestimate your enemies, Scrooge, dear,” Magica says in the recesses of his mind, as he watches his life play out before him like a picture show. 

“If you put any of them in danger again, I  _ swear  _ I’ll—” he snarls, but Magica derails his train of thought with a roar that makes the very foundations of his mind tremble. 

“You don’t get to make  _ threats  _ here. You are a vessel, Scrooge, whose suffering I find amusing.  _ This  _ was a warning. A reminder that you have no power here. Your family won’t come to your aid, not now, and not when you’ve torn their love asunder.”

Scrooge struggles under the force she exerts on his consciousness, stringing a sentence together never so daunting. “They’ll know something is wrong,” he asserts. “They won’t give in to your treachery.”

Magica tutted. “That’s where you’re wrong, dear. Your family will abandon you, as they always have. It’s in your nature to be abandoned.”

“No—”

“Yes.”

They’re boarding the  _ Sunchaser  _ now, the midday sun gradually sinking to early evening in a masterpiece of orange and pink and blue. Donald stops to squeeze Scrooge’s shoulder, on his way to make sure Dewey buckles himself into his seat correctly. 

“Enjoy the illusion while it lasts, Scrooge,” Magica says. 


End file.
